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I listed 3+years. I'm in the early years of retirement, and I can't say I'm someone that could just focus on a particular spot. I don't feel the USA as a whole just reaches out to everyone in the same way, and gives off that welcoming feel we all need. We really need that in life especially as we get older.. We all have different needs so for me its taken longer. Reading Best Places to retire lists are at least for me a waste of time. I think for many people they are a waste of time also. No one size fits all. Someone or one's is probably making quite abit of money from those lists in more ways than one. I am going to leave Oregon in 2 weeks. I am moving not vacationing. I am returning to my roots in New England for awhile. I'm going to take this road trip and visit places and people, and I feel its all going to fall into place during all of this.
We started looking about 14 years before I retired. My career had us moving a lot.
We lived in California, thought that we might like to settle there. So we got an apartment complex there as income-property, so we would already have an established base of operations there.
We bought an apartment building in Scotland, while stationed there. Thinking that it was/is such a wonderful location that when I retired the property would have been a great place to settle [or at least vacation to] after I retired. Economics were such that we later sold that property.
We did another one in New England and were there for a few years.
Then another in the PNW.
We tried living in different places, exploring to see if we would like to settle there. In the process we got income-property at each location. Just in case that was the 'perfect' spot.
But there were problems with each of those areas that bothered us. We ended up picking a location where we had never lived previously.
I made five trips here shopping for a location before I finally bought where we are now. We put much more thought into our final location, then we had any of our previous properties.
forest beekeeper, interesting experiences! Very different from our lives up to now, so I will have to reflect to see what I can apply from it to our situation.
Made the decision to retire ABC - Anywhere But California about 10 years out. Began general research and a winnowing process five years out and specific, directed, narrowing research about three years out. Stayed in place for a year after retirement to adjust to living on a pension and Social Security then made the move to our final choice. That was going on three years ago and we have absolutely no regrets. It's not a decision to be made lightly or on a mere whim.
I knew I wanted to stay in Texas but not in the Austin area so I spent some weekends driving around to different areas and spending the day in the small rural towns. Took me a little over 2 years to pick a place that "felt right".
I'm now here a little over 5 months and have no regrets about my decision.
We were living and working in Houston and grew to learn we wanted to leave Texas once retired. We consulted a financial planner 5 years out from our projected date to understand what we could afford, budget-wise in retirement, as we knew real estate was more expensive in places we liked. After all, there was no sense in getting our dreams together if they were unrealistic. Fortunately, years of disciplined saving put us in reasonably good shape. With our budget in hand, over the next five years we began exploring places on our short list. Two years before we retired, we found Philly unexpectedly set off all the bells on a visit here. We then concentrated our research and visits on Philly and put a plan into motion to sell the house along wither nearly everything in it and re-locate north once those two years passed.
The result: within a 3 day window, I retired, we closed on our Houston house sale and began the drive to Philly. Happy as clams.
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